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At this time we find him recommending Mr Browning's Men and Women to the Duke, who, like many Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and Duchess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood.
At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full Transcendentalism and How it Strikes a Contemporary as Browning's confession of his aims as an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things with abstractions rather than with actions.
Sharp would, I think, be the first to admit this; and it appears to me that, in the present case, he so formulates his theory as to satisfy his artistic conscience, and yet leave room for the recognition of that intellectual quality so peculiar to Mr. Browning's verse. But what one member of the aesthetic school may express with a certain reserve is proclaimed unreservedly by many more; and Mr.
Browning's correspondence for this year, it would certainly supply the record of her intimacy, and that of her husband, with Margaret Fuller Ossoli. A warm attachment sprang up between them during that lady's residence in Florence.
To admit ignorance of Tennyson or Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed through them in college and has never disturbed the dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered, sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever heard of Browning," by one who had penetrated about as far into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut it crawls over.
Browning's library, and during that time Rosamond had kept herself aloof from her guardian, meeting him only at the table, where she maintained toward him a perfectly respectful but rather freezing manner. She was deeply mortified to think he had won from her a confession of her love, and then told her how useless nay, worse how wicked it was for her to think of him.
But he can well do without them, and still have the inexhaustible left. The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Browning's poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and is not easy to comprehend even now for those who have the whole body of his work before them.
He is a strongly-drawn character, full of passion and noble desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs. Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics.
Through the zeal of his good mother on the boy's behalf the authorised editions were at a later time obtained; and she added to her gift the works, as far as they were then in print, of Keats. If ever there was a period of Sturm und Drang in Browning's life, it was during the years in which he caught from Shelley the spirit of the higher revolt.
He viewed it all like that child in Mrs. Browning's poem, 'seeing through tears the jugglers leap, and we have partaken of the juggler aspect to him ever since!" "I don't think he could ever be very irritable," said Fanny, taking the accusation much to heart. "Sister and recovery!" lightly said Bessie; "they encounter what no one else does!
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